Girls und Panzer episode 8 censored?

No--it's not that kind of censor in which you'll find in To-love-ru. This is about the GLROIO top image you can see on this week's Annotated Anime. The Crunchyroll stream for this week's Girls und Panzer appeared on Wednesday night, after the obligatory 2-day delay from the initial Japanese broadcast. It was missing something. It turns out that the rather epic segment where sort-of-Russian schoolgirls singing "Katyusha," the Soviet folk song made popular during WWII, was unceremoniously cut from the Crunchyroll stream. You can watch a clip of what was cut right above.

The cut footage details a "Russian" tank battalion rolling down the snow-covered landscape in their match with the protagonists' Sensha-do (the art of tank battle) team. It's rather epic, you see, because columns of T-34 tanks are awesome; because hearing Russophile voice actress Sumire Uesaka singing in her pretty-good Russian is awesome. What is probably not as awesome is copyright law.

While the copyright reason is the most likely why the segment was cut, Crunchyroll has not confirmed that precisely. We did get word that they were given this Katyusha-free version for broadcast from the licensor, and the end credit reflects the same when it excluded the credits for the Katyusha cover. It's always kind of sad when international legal red tape gets in our way. The worst part is not even how it blocked possibly the most climatic moment of the episode from being seen, but how it only pains those of us who want to stay legit through one of the legal streams.